Category Archives: Geek

Foursquare Tips & Etiquette: How to improve your recommendations and get the most out of Foursquare

Leave a reply

Foursquare is probably the greatest mobile experience ever built since it has the power to “profoundly touch and co-create our real life experiences”. With its ‘Explore’ recommendation engine, Foursquare has now evolved far beyond its roots as the check-in game of a few years ago.

Foursquare has received more than its fair share of negative feedback, usually regarding the “check-in game” of the service’s formative years (read this). While criticism in itself is fine, what bothers me is that the service’s detractors continue to dwell on what the service was, and not what it is today – Foursquare has pivoted into a powerful local search tool, has dialed back the check-in focus, and deserves renewed attention.

Foursquare, along with Instagram, are the only two social networks that I use regularly, on a daily basis (often in tandem). I love Foursquare for a number of reasons:

  • It intersects with my real life and actively influences where I go. 
  • It provides me with the best recommendations, bar none, on where to go, right now. Recommendations are current and highly personalised. i.e. recommendations change depending on the time of day, suggesting good lunch places at noon, great night life spots in the evening etc. Furthermore, they are based on the places I have visited so Foursquare knows the kinds of places I like.
  • It is an invaluable travel tool. I use it for finding the best places around where I am staying. Time and again I have found great restaurants with Foursquare, that I would never have discovered without it. (If you’ve never tried Foursquare’s ‘Explore’ feature, go here to try it out.)
  • It improves with use. Checking in and rating venues helps Foursquare learn where I like to go, and improves my recommendations. Put simply – the more you put into Foursquare, the more you get out of it.
  • It keeps a daily record of my whereabouts. By displaying my Foursquare check-in history in my calendar, it lets me view a detailed daily record of where I was, when. This can be incredibly useful later – it’s a window into the past that I can refer long after my memory has forgotten.
  • Venue tips provide great insider knowledge. The tips left by other users often provide way more insight or advice about a venue than a regular review. This is because Tips focus on what you should do when you are already there, not why you should go there in the first place.

Foursquare is an invaluable tool for discovering great places to go. No other application can provide such personalized recommendations. If you don’t have it installed on your phone, you should, if only for the ‘Explore’ feature. (Download it here.)

Whether you are a new user, a long term fan, or someone who previously got bored of the check-in game, these are my tips on how to get the most out of Foursquare…

Continue reading →

The Foursquare Map Problem in China – A plea for a solution!

5 Replies

Long term users of Foursquare in China will be all too familiar with the mapping problem in the mobile app – the location pins for all venues are displaying in the wrong place on the map. This is obviously an annoying problem and makes navigating to a venue for the first time particularly difficult. As a long term user and fan of the service, I have waited patiently for Foursquare to come out with a fix the but after several years and many updates the problem still remains. I am writing this post to publicise the problem, with the hope of providing enough information that they can set about fixing it.

Continue reading →

AppleScript: Automatically Quit/Pause Transmission when using Viscosity VPN Client

1 Reply

This article explains how to use some AppleScript to quit/pause the Transmission BitTorrent client when you connect to your VPN through Viscosity and reopen/resume it when you disconnect. Very useful if your VPN provider has a policy of disabling your account for BitTorrent usage…. Continue reading →

Help Beijing win a #4sqCities Badge!

Leave a reply

Foursquare have recently launched  a global competition for international cities to have a City Badge launched for their town. People can submit a list of the best venues from their town, be they restaurants, tourists sites or other unique or interesting destinations. For the winning cities, Foursquare will design a special City badge that users can unlock by visiting several or more places from the list. With this in mind, I have set the ball rolling on creating a list for Beijing, but I need your help.
Continue reading →

Bookmarklet to add Torrents to Transmission from your iPhone

Leave a reply

I have long been looking for a way to easily add a Torrent file to my Bittorrent client when out and about. Obviously the iPhone is a great solution for this but due to restrictions in Apple’s walled-garden they tend not to approve Bittorrent apps because of piracy concerns. While I concede that their concerns are not entirely unfounded, there are plenty of perfectly legal uses for Bittorrent. Android users have a great app called Transdroid that does exactly what I’m talking about. As a Mac user, I have been long term fan of the now excellent Transmission client. While Transmission has a nice iPhone friendly web interface it is severely lacking when it comes to adding Torrents from your phone. This is what this post addresses. Continue reading →

Five Online Predictions for 2007 (or, everyone is is writing theirs so why can’t I!)

6 Replies

Well it’s the new year and my blog has certainly suffered from a considerable amount of neglect in the last few months. This in part is because my blogging efforts (not to mention real life efforts) have been swallowed up by this. However, I thought it would be fun to start the year by first, actually writing a new post, and secondly writing the post of the moment which everyone seems to be doing, so without further ado here are my online predictions for 2007:

Continue reading →

Unbelievably Useful Firefox Tip

Leave a reply

This one is definitely for Geeks only! For those of you who browse the Internet using Mozilla Firefox, I just discovered a really useful little tip. If have just visited a link and realise that the previous page was also interesting, middle-click the Back button and it will load the previous page in a new tab. Should save time in the long run. Probably.

How d’you like them Apples?

10 Replies

iPod nano My colleague Chris returned from a business trip to the US today bringing me this little beauty. I loved my iPod Photo until it was unfortunately stolen out of my bag on my trip to Mongolia back in July. Since then I have been iPodless and waiting for a reason to buy a new one. Last week Apple gave me one when they unveiled ‘el nano’….

The picture on the website gives you some idea of what it’s like, but the thing I didn’t really take in was quite how small it is. It’s the same height as a busines card and thinner than the iPod shuffle. The display is also much better than I expected – I could see that it was smaller than the iPod Photo’s but had thought that it would feel squashed and be hard to read. However, the text is clear and even the album art is recognizable. I could be wrong about this but it seems the resoulution is higher than on a Photo which may have something to do it.

As I listen to it on my desk – I am continuously picking it up and playing with it – it really is one of those gadgets that seems somehow ahead of it’s time. They have taken all the features from the regular iPod and shrunk them to a quarter the size. Kudos to the Apple enginneers for a) squishing all those electronics into such a small design, and b) not letting slip to the public what they were working on all this time. News of this on the horizon would have hammered sales of the shuffle and mini….

There has been a lot of talk recently about how Apple’s honeymoon cannot last, and that there will be a backlash of consumers defecting to players from other manfacturers who don’t tie themsleves to such closed platforms. That may be true eventually but for the time being Apple are not going anywhere especially if they continue to innovate and produce players like this. Tempted?

Batch Adjusting the EXIF Time & Date data in your Digital Photos

9 Replies

Have you ever had the problem of going on holiday to a different time zone, and on your return discovering that you forgot to set your digital camera to the local time in the country you visited? This can be be irritating especially if you wish to combine your photos with those of a friend or familly member who was also on the trip – it is impossible to put them all together in chronological order. Having spent the last few months going through my old photos and uploading them to the web, I have encountered this problem with several batches of photos on my machine, so I did some research on the web to find a tool that could help me fix the problem. There are plenty of tools online that allow you to edit the time data of an image, but to edit each photo individually would take forever when you have 100 photos – what is needed is a tool to process a batch of images at once, automatically add/subtract each picture’s time taken/digitized by the difference in the time zones, e.g. adding 1 hour to each picture.

The best tool I found for the job is called Exifer, is free, and can be downloaded here. To adjust your photos here’s what you need to do:

Continue reading →

Shareaza 2.2 P2P Filesharing Tool Released

Leave a reply

After a year of development the latest version of P2P tool Shareaza has been released. Shareaza is a Windows–based peer-to-peer client which supports the Gnutella, Gnutella2, eDonkey Network, and BitTorrent network protocols. It is free, open source, and contains no adware or spyware. If you want to download music and videos from the web this is an excellent tool to use.

Download it here.

Continue reading →